Still House
From 2011 - 2022, Dan was artistic director of Still House, a company that made performance events spanning dance, theatre, short film and audio recordings.
Still House works often involved dance and music as a way of revealing ourselves to each other, better understanding each other and celebrating that which is different or overlooked.
Still House was produced by MAYK.
Selected works below. Closing statement below that.
On the closing of Still House
Over the past year or so I’ve been deliberately sat in a place of not knowing, of going slowly and yielding to the current. So much has changed in the world and more personally. In that space I’ve given myself permission to be carried, to wait and see where I land.
For a long time, this would have been anathema to me, fearful as I was that if I relented from the pace I’d set myself, things might fall apart.
I say this with a recognition that being able to go slower in this way is a privilege not available to everyone.
Out of this softer space, more recently a thought has crystallised; maybe it’s ok to let Still House go; that there is a season for all things and that Still House as an entity has done what it needed to do.
It has now been 11 years of Still House as a company and in that time, I have been lucky enough to have worked with some truly remarkable and inspiring human beings. That in turn has led to experiences that still somehow feel like dreams to me - such was their beauty and wonder. Sunsets over a city from a car park rooftop as a group of once strangers dance joyfully together. Creating a kind of dance séance in an old hall in the middle of Edinburgh. Conjuring the fens and its people in the NT Shed. Dancing and sweating all of it away together in a studio in Italy. The sight of hundreds of people rushing the dance floor having witnessed 25 young dancers from Tottenham rock the Southbank. These and so many more will be forever etched in my heart and mind.
There is now a sense of completion for me and of evolution. A sense that things don’t have to go on indefinitely. That to let go is not the same as failure. Within myself now I long for a kind of integration where all of the work I do – the directing, videography, movement directing/choreo, the teaching - can sit under the same banner and isn’t siloed away in different areas, some more visible than others. I want to bring all of the work I do into the light, to recognise it all as valid and to claim it under my own name.
This isn’t the end of me instigating and making projects. It doesn’t even close the door to possible remounts of Still House shows, should the circumstances be right. But it will no longer be under the banner of Still House.
To anyone who’s lives have intersected with Still House over the years; to the performers, the creatives, the production teams, the producers, the fixers and wranglers, the participants and the contributors, the audiences, commissioners and programmers… And especially to Kate Yedigaroff and Matthew Austin at MAYK – producers extraordinaire without whom none of it would’ve happened – and to Laura Dannequin, constant guiding force and sure hand throughout… the biggest thank you and the most love.
To the future…
Dan Canham, September 2022.